What I Do

WHO I AM: My Story

As a child, I looked up to my incredibly inspirational mum. She had the debilitating disease MS but, despite having plenty to whine about she never complained and constantly smiled.   My mum Denise and dad Roger met when they joined the same pop group and made it through to Melody Maker finals. I found this to be suitably cool and loved them both deeply.    I also loved how passionate my dad was  about a) his guitar playing and b) his garden. I noticed a difference in him when he was playing with me or his aforementioned musical /  botanical instruments of joy.

I didn't seem to have the immense imaginative talent to write fiction though, so I wrote features instead.   I interviewed lots of people. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things at first. Then successful people - popstars and rockstars for the music magazine site I set up with my other half, then business leaders and a range of inspirational people for business magazines and how-to-start-and-grow-a-business type books.     I learned a lot about achievement and failure and persistence from these others.     But, from myself, I learned resilience.     When I was 17 years old, my darling mum died. It hit me hard. How could/why would this happen? Yet, somehow, I summoned my inner strength, picked myself up and I lived.     I realised then that life was short. Hers was. She was 43.     After I'd come up for air and worked through my grief (and turbo-powered teenage angst/guilt/rebellion) I decided that, I actually wanted to make the most of my life. And so I stopped fopping around and raving on and sorted myself out.     I became my own boss, working from home, walking my dog in between writing features, websites and interviews.     A decade later, after pursuing and succeeding at my own dreams of becoming a free-range-author, I decided I wanted to help others to do the same; to live with intention and optimism; to make the most of their lives; like my mum had done and like my dad had just begun to do.

Cruelly, when I was half way through editing the pages of The Flourish Handbook, I learned that my dad had mesothelioma (asbestos-cancer) from his 30 years working for the railways. He'd been exposed to asbestos when he was a 16 year old apprentice.   Just three short weeks after this diagnosis, my dear dad was dead.   I didn’t show him the book as it was about living and he was shockingly about to lose his life. I just told him about it and he was, of course, immensely proud. But I didn’t expect to put the wisdom in that book into practice myself so soon.

Illustrations by the very marvellous Jo Bradshaw